That's exactly the kind of thing they want to use this type of robot for. They focus on rubble and similar terrain, because if it isn't hard to traverse, you might as well use wheels. Exploring mines and caves could be useful too, but urban search and rescue is a big topic now. After a disaster, you want to rescue people as fast as possible to save them, but the earlier after a collapse, the more dangerous it is for the rescuers who risk getting trapped themselves. Robots can be sent in immediately becuase you don't care much if you lose them.
They are slower, and although lighter, are less power efficient than ordinary motors. So unless weight is the only concern (and battery weight is't a problem), they aren't useful for much on reasonably sized robots. And as soon as your robot gets reasonably sized and isn't on a cord, battery size and weight is *the* problem. Also IIRC nitinol yield stress isn't that great (i.e. expensive *and* breaks when your actuator gets yanked on).
People are still working on artificial muscles though, and hopefully they'll get something that scales well eventually. It'll take a lot of work to catch up with a billion years of evolution however (or intelligent design by $DIETY, whatever).
This is more like a caterpillar than a snake. It uses tracks all over its body (like many small feet), rather than a serpentine motion to propel itself. Props though, as this seems far more practical than robots that actually try to move like snakes or inchworms.
I've sat through many talks about modular robots that are supposed to be able to do everything, yet rarely do anything well at all (I come from a lab doing what I guess you'd call "specialized monolithic" robots). I think this robot is just specialized enough to be useful (using its treads). The walking snake like robots are normally agonizingly slow, but this robot moves at a reasonable speed for the type of applications you'd need it for. Also, tracks should scale up in speed reasonably well if needed.
S-expressions are in prefix notation. Infix describes expressions such as "1+2". Lots of parenthesis is hard to read, but twice that number of angle brackets is certainly not easier.
Blurring the line between data and code is a useful technique...
This only matters if you use the data in Lisp without being careful. Any non-interpreted language could use it just as safely as XML.
P.S. I don't even like Lisp, being a person who likes type checking before I actually execute a snippet of code. On the other hand, they really do have a point regarding S-expressions and XML.
Well if that's the case neither does BSD, nor Windows for that matter. In reality the difference between a lot of distros (or Windows versions) is not that great. For Linux this is is especially true due to efforts like the LSB, and the fraction of distros which started as Debian or Red Hat clones.
So I guess you can upgrade Win2k to work like WinXP by installing all the updated DLLs? By the plural "those" I meant updating libraries, as in all of them that need updating, without reinstalling the OS. Debian, FreeBSD, and others let you do just that. Every major module can also be updated independently if you wish, and rarely are there incompatibilities because the OS manages dependencies for you, and programs use standard interfaces. I have Debian machines that were first installed 7 years ago and never needed to be booted from a CD to upgrade, yet they are completely up to date. In Windows I've never managed more than one upgrade on an install without having to wipe&reinstall.
But hey, there's Windows Update now; Welcome to the 90s. Maybe someday it'll even support 3rd party apps. Sure, Linux is "teh suck" for the desktop, and doesn't have cool apps, etc... For package/software management however, Windows isn't even in the same league.
Your argument seems to be: Windows provides backwards compatibility, while Linux does not provide forward compatibility.
Linux 2.2 and 2.4 applications work fine in 2.6, i.e. its backwards compatibility is fine, just like Windows. As far as forward compatibility, there are a lot more apps that depend on new Windows features than those that depend on Linux kernel features. Name an app that runs on 2.6 and won't run on 2.4. Outside of the kernel, there are indeed library issues, but these are no different from DLL issues on Windows. Linux normally lets me update those without replacing the whole damn system too.
The US's huge corporations will benefit massively from this, but that doesn't mean much will trickle down to ordinary citizens.
Europe has been a nice counter to the laws here up to now. For example, if someone threatens open source, we tell the politicians "If you don't let us work on it freely, then all the jobs working on it will move to Europe." Politicians like their bribes but they hate to hear about losing jobs. If the EU ends up with essentially identical IP laws, that won't work anymore.
Go ahead and name the patents and copyrights that have been violated. That's right, you can't...
The windows binary codecs were put up by their authors to download for free. If they let me have it for free, their's no copyright violated, and there's nothing stopping me from subsequently running it in the OS of my choice. But just in case someone starts trying to wield the POS DMCA, mplayer is conveniently based in Hungary.
P.S. Real is natively supported by Linux, and needs no windows binary decoder. Only MS and Apple are trying to leverage format lockin into OS lockin.
My thoughts exactly; I wish I had mod points. You worry about the small things that can cause big problems, not the small things which only inconvenience you. It was important that this was eventually caught, but the long term impact is zero.
Money used for an inquiry into what went wrong with MER would IMO be far better spent on further analyzing the shuttle failures or the upside-down accelerometer problem.
As for the robotics market, yes it is a growing one... Microsoft CE.NET is making large inroads in that market as well.
Do you have any evidence to back that up?
I'm a robotics researcher who's even made forays into this admittedly small but growing industry. Every robot I've ever worked around has been running either Aperios (Sony's entertainment robots), or Linux. Well I guess there is the one RoboCup team sponsored by MS that runs CE on their robots, but...
The three most important things IMO for a Robot OS: 1. The ability to remove crap you don't need (Linux 1, CE 1) 2. The ability to fix crap that's broken for your niche use (Linux 2, CE 1) 3. The ability to work well headless, with lots of supporting utilities (Linux 3, CE 1) 4. No license required to just start hacking (Linux 4, CE 1)
And compare this to Asimo and the other famous bipedal robots out of Japan - they maintain a statically stable support by balancing the center of mass directly over one of the legs
That's not exactly true, assuming by "stability" you mean "equilibrium". Asimo and QRIO operate in dynamic equilibrium, keeping the ZMP (Zero Moment Point) over their ground foot at all times. It's not statically stable in the sense that they could stop moving and not fall over. When both feet are down however, they usually do indeed go into a period of static equilibrium. A human gait (and presumably these new robots) don't keep the ZMP over the foot for a reasonable portion of the stride, so in that sense they are truly falling and catch themselves through the walking motion.
IJHR is a good new journal, and has the fulltext for every article. The first issue has a good history of the ZMP in bipedal locomotion.
You mean like this? Unfortunately for the current "study", it comes to a very different conclusion. But clearly, counting vulnerabilities for all packages (whether or not they are installed), is clearly a better methodology that actually testing something...
I just had an interesting thought; For hashing applications it seems it would be more secure to run a hash over two concatenated copies of the data. That way there's no end block which you can change and easily compute new hashes. I wonder why hash programs don't already use this technique. Obviously it'd be 2x slower, but it seems to me it would be worth the added cost in general.
And why do you think they are starving? Maybe it has something to do with spending more of their GDP on the military than any other nation on earth does? The have central planning with the stated policy of "military first", puting it above all else, yes even feeding the general population. So, your story is not relevant to the actual situation, which is more like the following:
Your daughter is dying in pain, and you could save her but you're busy spending the money making payments on a really nice car. I come along and say, I will provide money to save your daughter now, but you have to sell off the car. A reasonable person would accept, and then sell off the damn car they don't really need. An unreasonable person would keep the car and threaten to run people over with it unless I pay for more of their daughter's treatment.
You've just stumbled upon the "ends justify the means" arguement.
No I didn't. Cost/benefit analysis factors in the cost to get there, not just the benefit of the eventual goal. If the end justifies the means that usually tranlates into ignoring the cost to reach a goal. Of course in reality there is no such thing as an ultimate goal, so you just have to look as far as you can reasonably predict outcomes.
Not all of us agree with your utilitarian bullshit.
During WWII, lots of people didn't want the US to attack Germany; Are you still one of them? Luckily the government operates with a much more utilitarian approach to issues. Unfortunately their relative weights on perceived benefit versus human cost is currently at odds with much of the populous.
I hate it when the view humans violate the sacredicity of the governament! At least some of the whackos can spell. P.S. According to creationism God created light first; I'm not sure how that stands up in a secular court though. Allegedly He created humans a few days later because He was bored.
They are just exploiting an ignorant administration
That they did. Guess which administration gave them the original toothless aid-for-no-nukes agreement in 1994? Guess which administration took it away when NK violated it. Okay, now we're on the same page.
Did innocent German citizens deserve to die in WWII? No, they didn't, but it's pretty much unavoidable in a conflict. As much as people think it is insensitive, you have to look at the benefits vs. costs. This applies even beyond war. Assuming you drive a car, you must realize that innocent people have to die for people to drive cars (pedestrian accidents). It's inevitable, but if the benefits to society outweigh the costs...
Sigh, so many people have no idea of timeline or context: The US told NK they could have aid if they didn't develop nuclear technology. NK agreed to this 10 years ago. They then took the aid and developed nukes anyway. The US suspended aid, which NK then declared a "hostile" policy.
What is so unreasonable about following an agreement both sides made? If they want nukes, they can give up all future aid. The US would decline an offer in the same way. NK expecting to have both nukes and aid is completely unreasonable. The US doesn't need aid, so it doesn't need to give up nukes.
Slashdot Mirror
East coast theora mirror
:)
It's like a manual BitTorrent
That's exactly the kind of thing they want to use this type of robot for. They focus on rubble and similar terrain, because if it isn't hard to traverse, you might as well use wheels. Exploring mines and caves could be useful too, but urban search and rescue is a big topic now. After a disaster, you want to rescue people as fast as possible to save them, but the earlier after a collapse, the more dangerous it is for the rescuers who risk getting trapped themselves. Robots can be sent in immediately becuase you don't care much if you lose them.
They are slower, and although lighter, are less power efficient than ordinary motors. So unless weight is the only concern (and battery weight is't a problem), they aren't useful for much on reasonably sized robots. And as soon as your robot gets reasonably sized and isn't on a cord, battery size and weight is *the* problem. Also IIRC nitinol yield stress isn't that great (i.e. expensive *and* breaks when your actuator gets yanked on).
People are still working on artificial muscles though, and hopefully they'll get something that scales well eventually. It'll take a lot of work to catch up with a billion years of evolution however (or intelligent design by $DIETY, whatever).
This is more like a caterpillar than a snake. It uses tracks all over its body (like many small feet), rather than a serpentine motion to propel itself. Props though, as this seems far more practical than robots that actually try to move like snakes or inchworms.
I've sat through many talks about modular robots that are supposed to be able to do everything, yet rarely do anything well at all (I come from a lab doing what I guess you'd call "specialized monolithic" robots). I think this robot is just specialized enough to be useful (using its treads). The walking snake like robots are normally agonizingly slow, but this robot moves at a reasonable speed for the type of applications you'd need it for. Also, tracks should scale up in speed reasonably well if needed.
Oh, I thought "ubuntu" meant "nakedness in the default install."
And they have infix notation...
S-expressions are in prefix notation. Infix describes expressions such as "1+2". Lots of parenthesis is hard to read, but twice that number of angle brackets is certainly not easier.
Blurring the line between data and code is a useful technique...
This only matters if you use the data in Lisp without being careful. Any non-interpreted language could use it just as safely as XML.
P.S. I don't even like Lisp, being a person who likes type checking before I actually execute a snippet of code. On the other hand, they really do have a point regarding S-expressions and XML.
Linux "the OS" just doesn't exist.
Well if that's the case neither does BSD, nor Windows for that matter. In reality the difference between a lot of distros (or Windows versions) is not that great. For Linux this is is especially true due to efforts like the LSB, and the fraction of distros which started as Debian or Red Hat clones.
So I guess you can upgrade Win2k to work like WinXP by installing all the updated DLLs? By the plural "those" I meant updating libraries, as in all of them that need updating, without reinstalling the OS. Debian, FreeBSD, and others let you do just that. Every major module can also be updated independently if you wish, and rarely are there incompatibilities because the OS manages dependencies for you, and programs use standard interfaces. I have Debian machines that were first installed 7 years ago and never needed to be booted from a CD to upgrade, yet they are completely up to date. In Windows I've never managed more than one upgrade on an install without having to wipe&reinstall.
But hey, there's Windows Update now; Welcome to the 90s. Maybe someday it'll even support 3rd party apps. Sure, Linux is "teh suck" for the desktop, and doesn't have cool apps, etc... For package/software management however, Windows isn't even in the same league.
Dear Mod: How the hell was my post redundant? -1 anti-Windows?
Your argument seems to be: Windows provides backwards compatibility, while Linux does not provide forward compatibility.
Linux 2.2 and 2.4 applications work fine in 2.6, i.e. its backwards compatibility is fine, just like Windows. As far as forward compatibility, there are a lot more apps that depend on new Windows features than those that depend on Linux kernel features. Name an app that runs on 2.6 and won't run on 2.4. Outside of the kernel, there are indeed library issues, but these are no different from DLL issues on Windows. Linux normally lets me update those without replacing the whole damn system too.
The US's huge corporations will benefit massively from this, but that doesn't mean much will trickle down to ordinary citizens.
Europe has been a nice counter to the laws here up to now. For example, if someone threatens open source, we tell the politicians "If you don't let us work on it freely, then all the jobs working on it will move to Europe." Politicians like their bribes but they hate to hear about losing jobs. If the EU ends up with essentially identical IP laws, that won't work anymore.
Go ahead and name the patents and copyrights that have been violated. That's right, you can't...
The windows binary codecs were put up by their authors to download for free. If they let me have it for free, their's no copyright violated, and there's nothing stopping me from subsequently running it in the OS of my choice. But just in case someone starts trying to wield the POS DMCA, mplayer is conveniently based in Hungary.
P.S. Real is natively supported by Linux, and needs no windows binary decoder. Only MS and Apple are trying to leverage format lockin into OS lockin.
My thoughts exactly; I wish I had mod points. You worry about the small things that can cause big problems, not the small things which only inconvenience you. It was important that this was eventually caught, but the long term impact is zero.
Money used for an inquiry into what went wrong with MER would IMO be far better spent on further analyzing the shuttle failures or the upside-down accelerometer problem.
Err... Main language turn on?
Here is the article linking to the above picture. Anyone know why they chose platinum-iridium?
As for the robotics market, yes it is a growing one ... Microsoft CE .NET is making large inroads in that market as well.
Do you have any evidence to back that up?
I'm a robotics researcher who's even made forays into this admittedly small but growing industry. Every robot I've ever worked around has been running either Aperios (Sony's entertainment robots), or Linux. Well I guess there is the one RoboCup team sponsored by MS that runs CE on their robots, but...
The three most important things IMO for a Robot OS:
1. The ability to remove crap you don't need (Linux 1, CE 1)
2. The ability to fix crap that's broken for your niche use (Linux 2, CE 1)
3. The ability to work well headless, with lots of supporting utilities (Linux 3, CE 1)
4. No license required to just start hacking (Linux 4, CE 1)
And that pretty much sums up why we use Linux.
And compare this to Asimo and the other famous bipedal robots out of Japan - they maintain a statically stable support by balancing the center of mass directly over one of the legs
That's not exactly true, assuming by "stability" you mean "equilibrium". Asimo and QRIO operate in dynamic equilibrium, keeping the ZMP (Zero Moment Point) over their ground foot at all times. It's not statically stable in the sense that they could stop moving and not fall over. When both feet are down however, they usually do indeed go into a period of static equilibrium. A human gait (and presumably these new robots) don't keep the ZMP over the foot for a reasonable portion of the stride, so in that sense they are truly falling and catch themselves through the walking motion.
IJHR is a good new journal, and has the fulltext for every article. The first issue has a good history of the ZMP in bipedal locomotion.
You mean like this? Unfortunately for the current "study", it comes to a very different conclusion. But clearly, counting vulnerabilities for all packages (whether or not they are installed), is clearly a better methodology that actually testing something...
I just had an interesting thought; For hashing applications it seems it would be more secure to run a hash over two concatenated copies of the data. That way there's no end block which you can change and easily compute new hashes. I wonder why hash programs don't already use this technique. Obviously it'd be 2x slower, but it seems to me it would be worth the added cost in general.
And why do you think they are starving? Maybe it has something to do with spending more of their GDP on the military than any other nation on earth does? The have central planning with the stated policy of "military first", puting it above all else, yes even feeding the general population. So, your story is not relevant to the actual situation, which is more like the following:
Your daughter is dying in pain, and you could save her but you're busy spending the money making payments on a really nice car. I come along and say, I will provide money to save your daughter now, but you have to sell off the car. A reasonable person would accept, and then sell off the damn car they don't really need . An unreasonable person would keep the car and threaten to run people over with it unless I pay for more of their daughter's treatment.
You've just stumbled upon the "ends justify the means" arguement.
No I didn't. Cost/benefit analysis factors in the cost to get there, not just the benefit of the eventual goal. If the end justifies the means that usually tranlates into ignoring the cost to reach a goal. Of course in reality there is no such thing as an ultimate goal, so you just have to look as far as you can reasonably predict outcomes.
Not all of us agree with your utilitarian bullshit.
During WWII, lots of people didn't want the US to attack Germany; Are you still one of them? Luckily the government operates with a much more utilitarian approach to issues. Unfortunately their relative weights on perceived benefit versus human cost is currently at odds with much of the populous.
I hate it when the view humans violate the sacredicity of the governament! At least some of the whackos can spell. P.S. According to creationism God created light first; I'm not sure how that stands up in a secular court though. Allegedly He created humans a few days later because He was bored.
They are just exploiting an ignorant administration
That they did. Guess which administration gave them the original toothless aid-for-no-nukes agreement in 1994? Guess which administration took it away when NK violated it. Okay, now we're on the same page.
Did innocent German citizens deserve to die in WWII? No, they didn't, but it's pretty much unavoidable in a conflict. As much as people think it is insensitive, you have to look at the benefits vs. costs. This applies even beyond war. Assuming you drive a car, you must realize that innocent people have to die for people to drive cars (pedestrian accidents). It's inevitable, but if the benefits to society outweigh the costs...
Sigh, so many people have no idea of timeline or context: The US told NK they could have aid if they didn't develop nuclear technology. NK agreed to this 10 years ago. They then took the aid and developed nukes anyway. The US suspended aid, which NK then declared a "hostile" policy.
What is so unreasonable about following an agreement both sides made? If they want nukes, they can give up all future aid. The US would decline an offer in the same way. NK expecting to have both nukes and aid is completely unreasonable. The US doesn't need aid, so it doesn't need to give up nukes.